Our hell on paradise isle

Reading friends Nancy Apperley, Julia Ord-Hume, Tracey Apperley and Thomas ‘Al' Baynham relax in a Bali beach bar. Little did they know their holiday in paradise would turn into a living hell as they narrowly escaped the Kuta Beach bomb and helped tend the horribly wounded in the Bali blast.

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She is already planning to go back to Kuta for October 12, next year, the first anniversary of the terrorist bomb attack that has so far claimed187 lives.

She says the atrocity can't be allowed to destroy the peace-loving community of Bali.

"One of the saddest things about this is that the Balinese people are the most friendly I have ever met. You walk down a street there and all you see is thousands of happy smiling faces.

"On Sunday [the day after the bomb] when we went out we saw just 12 men and they weren't speaking, it was total silence.

"I will go back. I want to show the terrorists they have not won. I want to take part in a memorial service next year."

She says the strange silence descended on the resort the moment after the explosion.

The 29-year-old from Southlake Court, Woodley, was savouring the last night of a blissful three-week holiday with her sister Tracey, of Larch Drive Woodley, her best friend Thomas Baynham, known as Al, who manages Broad Street surf shop Quiksilver, and Julia Ord-Hume, who lives on Oxford Road.

She says: "We were having a drink in an open-air bar at our hotel. The lights flickered and it went really eerie.

"Then there was big noise that was the explosion. It sounded like a big clap of thunder and the earth shook.

"Then we saw the mushroom cloud and the flames, but we still didn't know what had happened.

"But by that time the first people who had been in the Sari Club and managed to escape were arriving back and they needed help."

After three hours spent tending to the wounded, Nancy went to the room she shared with her sister.

She says: "We still didn't know there had been a bomb. We just lay there trying to make sense of it all."

At 5am she received a text message from her boyfriend Paul Chick, saying it was a terrorist attack. Indonesian television is not subject to censorship and graphic images of the explosion have left enduring images in Nancy and her friend's minds.